Brits lead provincial foreign residents stats; spectacular growth in number of foreign nationals and bad news for provincial capital

CÁDIZ PROVINCE The latest figures to come from the National Statistics Institute, which go back to the beginning of 2010 on this subject, say that the number of foreign residents in the province more than quadrupled in ten years: from 10,350 in 2000 to 47.767 in 2010. If they/we all lived in the same town, it would be the ninth lagest in the povince. The British community leads the ranking with 8,745, concentrated principally in the Campo de Gibraltar, followed closely by Moroccans (7,449), mainly in the Bay of Cadiz and in the Jerez areas. Other significant shifts upwards include>
Romanians (3,493, although a slight decrease is noted towards the end of the decade); Latin Americans (there are 2,670 Bolivians, for instance). Lack of work in other places are a factor in these figures.

Notable, too, is the number of people of Chinese nationality, which have 1,320 residents and in the capital city, Cádiz, they would be third, behind Bolivians and Romanians.

Other indicators, not only for the province itself, but for the rest of the country, too, is a marked increase in the number of elderly. Staying with the provincial figures, a couple of examples: on January 1, 2010, Cádiz city had 2,508 residents aged over 85, Jerez, which has a larger population than Cádiz (83,000 more), had 2,582.

The population of over-65s comes to 23,000 in Cádiz, a large percentage of the total population of 125,826 (20%). Similar figures, but in much smaller proportions, occur in Jerez (27,000 out of 208,896, or 10%) and Algeciras (15,000 of the 116,417, a total number that is very close to that of the provincial capital, or not quite 15%).

The trend for the provincial capital is decidedly downwards in terms of total population and elderly inhabitants. This has been a fact for the last decade: in 2000, the population included 43,000 between the ages of 0 to 25, which with today's statistics, means a loss of over 43,000 residents. This has severe repercussions in the number of schools and available labour force, fo example.